The Web Lecture Archive Project is a joint venture between the UM-ATLAS Collaboratory Project, the University of Michigan Media Union, and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. One of its goals is to implement an electronic archival system for slide-based presentations on the Internet. The project also seeks to assess the ability of the system to improve upon and complement existing archival methods, and to determine the resources required to install and maintain the system as a standard archival service.

The current project builds upon the work initiated by a pilot project carried out July-September, 1999, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

The archive system is based on the implementation of the Sync-O-Matic 3000, software, written by Dr. Charles Severance to synchronize electronic slide presentations with audio/video recordings. An important advantage of the system is the greatly improved readability of slides compared to existing methods which attempt to capture images from an overhead screen. The resulting archive requires no software for playback other than a commercial web-browser and the Real Player (TM) software typically bundled with such browsers. The project is being coordinated with the CERN Internet Applications group as a complementary addition to the current Webcasting Projects, which focus on the live presentation of seminars and other events from CERN.

Initial implementation and tests of the system include the archival of several of the CERN Summer Student Lectures from 1999. These lectures are held every summer as an integral part of the CERN Summer Student Program and include presentations by leading experts in the field of Particle Physics, Accelerator Physics and Computing. A complete listing of the 1999 Lecture Program can be found here.

In addition to the Summer Student Lecture archives, the system has also been tested as a tool for distance learning. In collaboration with the ATLAS Experiment and CERN Technical Training, we archived several of the ATLAS Offline Software Training courses. These lectures can be found here. This aspect of the project addresses the issue of training for a large and globally dispersed collaboration, a problem common to the LHC collaborations at CERN and the HEP community as a whole.

The main purpose of this project to test and evaluate the archival system as a tool for collaborative communication and learning. Its success is best measured by the feedback of its users. The project team encourages you to view the archived Summer Student Lectures and the LHC Software Training Lectures and to provide us with comments or suggestions via the Feedback Form. Thank you and enjoy the talks!

	For information: wlap@umich.edu
Last modified: Thursday, 10-Jul-2003 13:43:40 EDT